Abstract
Epistemic terms of various syntactic categories can uniformly be used to do the same thing—to hedge. This essay clarifies hedging as a phenomenon and explains how hedging happens by advancing the positional theory. The guiding idea is that, in uttering declaratives, speakers signal what their epistemic position is towards the content put into play by the declarative. The default signal is that the speaker knows. But when an epistemic term hedges, the term overrides the default. The non-default signal sent is that the speaker or someone else occupies the position indicated by the term. To make that idea precise, the positional theory treats hedging as a discourse function. Terms hedge because of how a declarative containing an epistemic term is situated within a discourse.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 98 |
| Journal | Synthese |
| Volume | 204 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Sep 2024 |
Funding
In addition to referees recruited by this journal and others, I am thankful to audiences at Northern Illinois University and University of Chicago, and students in my Fall 2019 and Spring 2021 graduate seminars at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. This paper was also supported in Summer 2021 by the UWM Advancing Research and Creativity Award.
Keywords
- Assertion
- Coherence relations
- Hedging
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Philosophy
- General Social Sciences